As the global population ages and includes more elderly people, nurses will be in increasingly short supply. Thus, the medical device industry will focus research efforts on finding ways to reduce misdiagnosis, improving patients' condition after treatment, and enhancing home care services. In addition, with the aging of the global population, the number of patients is increasing dramatically. In particular, the number of patients with metabolic diseases is growing especially quickly and estimated to over 1.1 billions in 2012. Therefore, hospitals will have greater need for Point-of-Care Testing (POCT) systems. The demand for such POCT systems is estimated to be increasing at an annual rate of 14.1%.
One type of POCT system is the low-invasion biochemical testing system. This system requires only a small amount of blood for testing and is therefore preferred by patients over other testing systems. However, although the biochemical testing system requires only small amounts of blood, the testing strip still contains a quantity of blood sample after testing. Therefore, there still remains the risk of infection to medical caregivers, especially when such personnel must remove the testing strip by hand.
Taiwanese Patent M368068 discloses a holding device for testing strips that is capable of ejecting the testing strips. FIG. 1 shows a traditional holding device 10 for testing strips comprising an accommodation body 110, an ejection body 150, an L-shaped fixation member 120, a sensing terminal 130, and a spring 140. The holding device 10 utilizes a number of designs such as allowing the spring 140 to surround the rod 153, embedding the spring 140 into the guiding groove 118, aligning the first blocker 115 and the second blocker 155, and engaging the fixation member 120 with the groove 114 to stabilize the elastic force for ejecting the testing strip. Although the traditional holding device provides equal elastic force to prevent the holding device 10 from coming apart and to control the ejecting direction of the testing strip, the accommodation body 110 must be driven in parallel to the testing strip which constrains the ejecting distance and direction of the testing strip. In addition, the structure of the holding device 10 is too complicated to easily reduce cost or to control the ejecting force of the testing strip.
Therefore, it is necessary to provide a lower-cost holding device having a simple structure and a user-friendly operation.